might lay its tiny palm
upon the base of some great cliff, and hold that love in a real grasp of
a real knowledge and certitude, but we cannot put our hands round it and
feel that we _com_prehend as well as _ap_prehend. Let us be thankful
that we cannot.

His love can only become to us a subject of knowledge as it reveals
itself in its manifestations. Yet after even these manifestations it
remains unuttered and unutterable even by the Cross and grave, even by
the glory and the throne. 'It is as high as heaven; what canst thou do?
deeper than hell; what canst thou know? The measure thereof is longer
than the earth, and broader than the sea.'

We have no measure by which we can translate into the terms of our
experience, and so bring within the grasp of our minds, what was the
depth of the step, which Christ took at the impulse of His love, from
the Throne to the Cross. We know not what He forewent; we know not, nor
ever shall know, what depths of darkness and soul-agony He passed
through at the bidding of His all-enduring love to us. Nor do we know
the consequences of that great work of emptying Himself of His glory. We
have no means by which we can estimate the darkness and the depth of the
misery from which we have been delivered, nor the height and the
radiance of the glory to which we are to be lifted. And until we can
tell and measure by our compasses both of these two extremes of possible
human fate, till we have gone down into the deepest abyss of a
bottomless pit of growing alienation and misery, and up above the
highest reach of all unending progress into light and glory and
God-likeness, we have not stretched our compasses wide enough to touch
the two poles of this great sphere, the infinite love of Jesus Christ.
So we bow before it, we know that we possess it with a knowledge more
sure and certain, more deep and valid, than our knowledge of ought but
ourselves; but yet it is beyond our grasp, and towers above us
inaccessible in the altitude of its glory, and stretches deep beneath us
in the profundity of its condescension.

And, in like manner, we may say that this known love passes knowledge,
inasmuch as our experience of it can never exhaust it. We are like the
settlers on some great island continent--as, for instance, on the
Australian continent for many years after its first discovery--a thin
fringe of population round the seaboard here and there, and all the
bosom of the land untraversed and unknown.